September 5, 2007

Fathom

“Praise God for what you can fathom; / for what you can’t fathom, praise God”
(Psalm 146).*

Throughout her first six months of abstinence from alcohol, a friend of mine was like the guy in the TV ad gleefully stopping anybody and everybody anywhere to tell them his cholesterol is down. She was incessantly grateful for her “new” life away from substance abuse.

One day, her fortune turned, and all we could hear was a bad case of the “why me’s?” Finally, somebody took her in hand and told her, Try showing as much gratitude for the bad stuff as for the good. Maybe there’s meaning in discomfort as well as in comfort. Maybe some thanksgiving when we rarely think of offering thanksgiving will open a perspective never seen before.

Fear blinds the path to praise. Anxiety throws life’s lenses out of focus. Anger is an inevitable response. Isaiah says, “Be strong, fear not!” (Is 25.4) James reminds with his timeless phrase, “be doers of the word, and not hearers only, deceiving yourselves” (Jas 1.22). Twelve-Step programs claim there’s little effect in recovery, lest one “walk the talk.” All that’s well and good, but not all that easy to undertake.

“Praise God for what you can fathom; / for what you can’t fathom, praise God” (Ps 146).

To fathom is to understand. To understand is to find meaning, support, foundation. For the thoughtful, maybe it’s an easy cause for gratitude. But not to fathom, to find no meaning rarely provokes a grateful heart, only a fearful one. Such fear is an enemy. Much fear pervades today the very community whose love it is said can cast it out.

In the “Prayers of the People,” the time following the opportunity for intercession is often filled with names, events, needs, some fears, and more than a few mumbles. The time appointed for thanksgiving is more often ominously quiet.

The psalmist suggests that this part of the Prayers may be a good place to praise God for what we cannot fathom, perhaps for our enemy fear. Jesus said to love our enemies. Praise is not an altogether bad way to start the improbability of all that.

*Stephen Mitchell, “A Book of Psalms: Selected and Adapted from the Hebrew,” HarperCollins, 1993, p 79

September 4, 2007

Snakes

Somebody who knows a lot more than I about this sort of thing says that neurosis has nothing to do with how one behaves or how one suffers. It has nothing to do with the fact that the psyche, the self, is already infused with contradictions. Rather is neurosis primarily the failure of the capacity to attend to the truth about oneself, whatever it may be, with an awareness free of emotionalism — a capacity that the great spiritual masters called sobriety.

All of which reminds me of all sorts of things in our current miasma in church and state, but also reminds me of a story I’ve told here before and will tell again in one way or another. Because it might even be a parable.

A very inebriated woman staggered across the back yard of a suburban residence one balmy autumn afternoon and caught the attention of the older couple who lived there. She looked quite helpless and disoriented. The yard backed up to a steep bluff overlooking the edge of a deep lake. Fearing for her safety, the couple went out to see what they might do. The woman resisted forcefully and said she wanted to kill herself by jumping off the cliff into the lake. They were able to distract her long enough to phone their pastor who lived nearby to come and help.

“Why did you frighten these people?” the parson asked the woman. “Why didn’t you go ahead and jump?”

“Because,” said the woman, “I’d have to walk through all that underbrush by the bluff. There may be snakes. I hate snakes.”

September 3, 2007

Work

I like the way musicians and athletes think about work. It’s a way that seems to escape the many of us. They just don’t call it work, they call it play. Even the amateurs in the arts and in the sports (literally, the lovers of the work or whatever) catch some of that spirit when they’re into it and, of course, have shoes that fit.

Millions of people are are out of work and without a place to lose themselves. Millions of people have only make-do work, without a place to find themselves. This Labor Day and all the others celebrate work and workers. It’s a kind of gossamer holiday, maybe even a joke on ourselves. For those of us for whom it is a day off from a work that does not exist, it is not even much of a time for play and too much of a time for anxiety.

An ad more or less about work and play came in the mail the other day. It announced, and urged me to be excited about, a piano that performs all by itself at the touch of a button.

It assured me that I could hear — and even watch — my piano play my favorite songs — jazz to country, classical to Broadway. “It’s almost like your favorite artists right in your living room,” it claimed. A player grand “system” awaits you, now starting at under $10,000.

The great pianist Vladimir Horowitz once was asked, What is music? He answered that music is made up of little dots on a page, some black and some white. He said that anyone can learn to “read the dots,” then render them quite accurately on some instrument, rather like an expert stenographer might transcribe shorthand.

But, he warned, this is not music. One must first discover what is “behind the dots” for there to be music. Then one must play this discovery from one’s heart in one’s own way with spirit and imagination, maybe even quite differently from time to time, and certainly not be satisfied merely to replicate it. Only then is there music.

I thought about the ad and about Horowitz’s definition when CP and I were lately at a reception in the great lobby of one of those fashionably musty retirement high-rises for the geriatrophied among us. You know the type — motel art on the walls, artificial schefflera in Rooms-to-Go Ming Dynasty urns, make-believe orientals on the floors. Over in one corner, the faux theme continued. Nineteenth-century parlor ballads labored forth out of a splendid Yamaha grand, its Walter-Mitty keys pock-a-ta, pock-a-ta-ing right along. There seemed to be absolutely nothing behind its dots, ironically putting one more musician, might we say, out of work, off the bench, and out of play.

As soon as CP was distracted elsewhere and nobody was watching, I disconnected the Yamaha’s life support. Nobody else seemed to notice, but the silence was music to my ears.